Imagine the Possibilities – Doodle Roll Review

I had written a little blurp about Doodle Roll a few weeks ago in regards to helping them Get On the Shelf at Walmart (you can still help by the way!) and now I’m really excited to tell you about my sons reaction to Doodle Roll and offer your children a chance to win one!

My teen stared at the Doodle Roll as if he were waiting for lights to start flashing and buttons to magically appear to push. This is the same child who thought that our T.V. was broken when I was watching a B&W movie once so I explained to him that you have to use your imagination, it’s for doodling. So of course he asked me what Doodling was, which he does all the time without realizing it. I see it on all his homework, these little stick figures and cartoon paper animations he makes by flipping the papers quickly. I realized that perhaps a lot of kids don’t actually understand what ‘doodling’ is even if they do it every day.

A doodle is an unfocused drawing made while a person’s attention is otherwise occupied. Doodles are simple drawings that can have concrete representational meaning or may just be abstract shapes.

Stereotypical examples of doodling are found in school notebooks, often in the margins, drawn by students daydreaming or losing interest during class. Other common examples of doodling are produced during long telephone conversations if a pen and paper are available.

Popular kinds of doodles include cartoon versions of teachers or companions in a school, famous TV or comic characters, invented fictional beings, landscapes, geometric shapes and patterns, textures, banners with legends, and animations made by drawing a scene sequence in various pages of a book or notebook. – Wiki

Well, he wasn’t interested at the time so my tot and I played with the Doodle Roll a lot, we both like to color. Here is his masterpiece The Green Tree, he called it.

He likes to color standing up mostly, so he can run around appreciating his art. What he liked the best was pulling out the paper and having the entire space to doodle and then watching Mommy roll it up. I love that you can save it without having a ton of papers to put away or have to toss out. I realized at once that I could keep all my sons little drawings by rolling it up and pinning it later to be put away. It takes up no space at all! We aren’t finished with it yet! It’s a mighty big roll.

So, back to my teen. The other day I caught him playing with it, he started using it for just scribble notes for Math homework and then came his little stick figures and odd things he draws from time to time. He was having a lot of fun with it once he realized he could just use his own pencil instead of the crayons that it came with. And I was happy to realize it was a great way to use to work out Math problems, I never thought about that!

I keep the Doodle Roll on the counter just in case anyone would like to use it or play with it. I also keep the traveling companion one in my purse, a smaller version that you can take anywhere you go. It’s come in handy with my tot when we are somewhere he needs to sit quietly. I really hope that they get chosen to be put on the shelves of Walmart, I don’t think a lot of people realize how relaxing it is for kids to doodle when they are thinking or want to be creative. I’m pretty sure that’s how many of the animators we love today started out, or the comic strips that we chuckle at every Sunday. There are lots of other fun ideas on Doodle Roll’s page if you want to switch it up a little; a page for GrownUps on the benefits of Doodling, Ideas and Safety.

All of us, at one point or another in our lives, have played around with doodling. It’s a great way to promote free thinking and a gift away from all the electronics that wire our children. Creativity and Imagination are not things we can teach our children, but we can inspire them through products like Doodle Roll, and inspiration is how we learn the better aspects of ourselves.